"Ian Douglas" alug@the-zub.demon.co.uk writes:
Steve Fosdick wrote:
so assuming the new partition is mounted on /mnt/root I would say:
cp -a [b-l]* [o-t]* v* /mnt/root
I am specifying those directories I want to copy by range, based on the first letter...
Thanks for the suggestion Steve. I must admit I did actually use the cp command to copy /home to the new partition without problems but have a nagging worry in the back of my head that someone on the list had loads of hassle trying to copy system directories earlier in the year. I seem to remember it was symbolic links and special system files which didn't copy correctly and caused the problems.
"cp -a" should work fine. Other possible invocations of cp might well cause problems, and AFAIK all the non-GNU versions of cp don't have the feature at all...